World Cup football fans asked to help find grave of Geordie merchant seaman

Alfred Ormston died on his way to Rio de Janeiro in 1887 and now his great great nephew is appealing for help to check on his grave

Leo Ormston's (Pictured) Great-Great Uncle Alfred Ormston is buried in a graveyard in Rio. He is seeking help from football fans traveling to Brazil for the World Cup to find and take a photograph of the Grave

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A Tyneside grandfather is hoping World Cup fans will help him find the grave of a Geordie merchant seaman in Brazil.

Alfred Ormston died of cholera while en route to Rio de Janeiro in 1887, with his unscrupulous crew dousing him with booze in an effort to conceal his true cause of death.

Now 127 years on, his great great nephew Leo, 71, is appealing for visitors to the Brazilian city to see if they can find where the 21-year-old was laid to rest – and send him back a photo.

“My family were always seafaring people and were always running ships from the Quayside in Newcastle,” the dad-of-four, from High Heaton, said. “Alfred was a master mariner at only 21 and, so the story goes, one day a gentleman of mixed race approached him for a job.

“Alfred’s mother said, ‘No, don’t do it. I have a bad feeling about it. Don’t take him on,’ but he told her that he needed the extra crew.

“Halfway across the Atlantic, this young fellow was taken ill and the rest of the crew said, ‘He’s got cholera. We want nothing to do with him.’ So Alfred looked after him, but he died, and then Alfred was taken ill.

“As they approached Rio, Alfred was dying and the rest of the crew began to ply him with alcohol – continuing even after he was dead – in an effort to convince the port authorities that he had died of alcohol poisoning and not quarantine the ship.

“It worked. Alfred was buried in the English cemetery in Rio and the ship went on its way.

“But to a seafaring family, saying that one of them had died of drunkenness on a voyage was a terrible slur.

“And so, despite having little money, Alfred’s mother paid for him to be exhumed and his body tested – revealing he had died of cholera.”

Collect of Alfred Lindsay Ormston Grave in Brazil

Yet Alfred’s body was never brought home, and though Leo has a grainy photocopy of a photo of the his ancestor’s headstone, none of his family have ever been able to make the trip to South America.

“I’m anxious to know if it is still there – so I wonder if there may be anyone from the North East who is going to the World Cup and might go to see, and maybe take a photo if it is?” the library book collector and amateur local historian said.

Leo believes Alfred is buried in the English Cemetery at Gamboa. Founded in 1809 after Dom João VI ceded two and a half acres of farmland along the shore of the bay to the British, the cemetery saw its first burial take place in 1811.

The cemetery is on the side of the Morro da Providência hill, which is otherwise occupied by the Favela da Providência – the first favela in Rio.

The cemetery is reached either from the Avenida Rodrigues Alves, from the Avenida Presidente Vargas and the Central railway station.

Anyone who can help contact ec.news@ncjmedia.co.uk or tweet us @EveningChron.